PHILADELPHIA — When Brett Brown has a moment, and when he concentrates, and when he takes a deep breath, he can remember his first game as an NBA head coach. Almost.

“It seems like,” he said. “a thousand years ago.”

A lot can happen in a basketball millennium, and Brown figures it has. His Sixers have made some improvements, have had some disappointments, have had some more disappointments, and once were caught successfully closing out a three-point shooter. But they are no longer likely to do what they did back when they were defeating the defending champion Miami Heat by 14 points, spinning the Wells Fargo Center into an unexpected frenzy of basketball fantasy.

Sixers fever? As it went, it did sound a whole lot better than “Together We Build.”

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The Sixers have won a dozen times since then, which was just more than three months ago, not a thousand years. They’ve lost 26 times, including Friday, 101-86, to the Heat. Yet just as he had when his team was 1-0 in October, Brown will keep perspective in January. And even though there is not going to be a May for the Sixers — not this year, not for many years to come probably — he figures that at least they are headed that way.

“I’m very happy,” Brown said. “You could rightfully say it was something a little bit different to open an NBA season. Given the roster that we had, we achieved something really extraordinary to start a year by beating a team like that. I think it has sort of settled down and balanced out. It’s a lot more real, the landscape of the NBA. And it’s a lot more real, the realities of our roster. But I feel I am proud of where we are at.

“I feel like we are developing the way that we want. And I hope we are playing with a tenacity that gains the respect of the league and the city.”

That was his cry before the game, not that the Sixers would provide an echo. Rather, they would buckle on defense, bite on too many ball fakes and flop to a 17-point halftime deficit. By the fourth quarter, Brown had a choice: Allow that to continue and risk demoralization … or try something else, something fresh. So to the bench went the regulars. And for the fourth quarter, it would be Tony Wroten, Dewayne Dedmon, Hollis Thompson, Elliott Williams and Brandon Davies.

Those guys.

Them?

“We were done,” Brown said. “I felt that my starters were done. Coaches always go through that line: When do you feel that you are just flogging them, having them put forth energy that is not going to result in a win? Then, your best chance is with energy and youth, because they don’t know what they don’t know.”

Brown’s blissfully unaware lineup, thick with players seemingly better suited for the Sixers’ Delaware outpost, could have pulled within 11 points had Wroten’s possible and-one not been overturned by a charging call. So active were they — in the way that a developing team needs young players to be busy — that Erik Spoelstra needed to keep his Beautiful People on the floor just to avoid another South Philadelphia humiliation.

“The guys deserved to be playing,” Spencer Hawes said. “They played well. They turned the game around when we couldn’t.”

Something has to turn for the Sixers, who have lost five of their last six and who look so much different than the team that roared to a 19-0 lead over the Heat just 39 games ago.

“It really seems like an eternity ago,” Brown said. “I just feel that this league is so fast-moving. If there was anything to gain from that game, it was the reality that our young team was able to beat an NBA champion. And you can’t take that away from them. But the reality, for me, is that it seems so far away.

“It’s a time gone by.”

It was a time passed … and a time, Brown is right to believe, will return. It’s just that sometimes, it can seem 10 centuries away.